One night event and subsequent site specific installation with sound, lighting, appropriated and fabricated objects.
Produced in collaboration with local musicians, DJs, VJs, and promoters as part of IZOLYATSIA Artists-in-Residence Program 2012-13 and presented as part of TURBOREALISM (Breaking Ground), curated Victoria Ivanova & Agnieszka Pindera
12 July 2012 – 03 November 2013
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From the folder accompanying exhibition:
Upon entering the train depot with the evocative number “1990” laid out in brick above its closed gates, we encounter a scene that escapes precise characterisation. On the one hand, everything within these walls hints at an event that has already taken place, while on the other hand, the space feels poignantly, if somewhat hauntingly, alive.
On the night of 22 June, 2012, Daniel Malone organised a rave party – 1990NOW! – in a defunct train depot with the participation of Donetsk-based musicians, DJs and VJs such as That Black, September27, KFR Records, Golos Ottuda Promo, Musika-Smert and Versus Promo. Malone masterminded the rave as an occasion that ties together the various elements he activated during his residency in Donetsk: restoration of found instruments previously used by the factory’s band, the setting up of a music studio, as well as ongoing research into the history of industrial rave parties and music with a focus on the 1990s, and philosophical thinking on the significance of science fiction. In the words of the artist, the event functioned as an “engine” that brought nascent and previously disjointed ideas and realities together, and which continues to spin its wheels even after its presumed conclusion.
Malone uses theorist Frederic Jameson’s idea of the “radical potentiality of science fiction” in proposing a scenario which defies the normal operation of time and matter, instead proposing diachronic temporality or a sense of absolute simultaneity that flows out of the most ubiquitous strategy of science-fiction – time travel. The installation’s audio-piece conveys this approach: composed strictly from sound sourced on site; field recordings of factory machines being turned on again in 2012, samplings of Soviet built synthesisers and other instruments long in storage complemented by ‘industrial’ metallic percussion played on the ruins of defunct machinery, with snippets of 1980s pop-music, in-house Soviet cultural events, and a canonical speech announcing the end of the Second World War all extracted from reel-reel tapes found on the territory of the former factory.
Other references function in a similar key: a train platform that has been rolled in for the rave-party has reestablished the building’s purpose; a suspended sculpture modelled on the one that adorns the ceiling of the Yunost Palace of Youth – the venue of the first ravers’ club in Donetsk in the 1990s called Mystik; a curtain also based on the clubs makeshift decor now seems to be cordoning off a prohibited zone; remnants of leaflets and posters from the party with the latter based on the poster designed for Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm, Donbass Symphony (1931); and last but not least the fact that the event was held on the same day as the beginning of the Second World War.